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Satyagraha at the London Coliseum

Richard Morrison

November 22 2013, 12:01am, The Times

Even in Sanskrit, Gandhi’s ideas are mesmerisingly translated by the ingenious use of puppeteers, mimes and stilt-walkersDonald Cooper

If you had asked me in advance whether I would enjoy a 3½-hour opera about the early career of Mahatma Gandhi, sung in Sanskrit without surtitles and set to the eternally repetitive music of Philip Glass, I would have given a very rude reply — almost certainly not in Sanskrit. The concept of satyagraha, roughly meaning “sticking to the truth”, was an important element in Gandhi’s philosophy of passive resistance to oppression — and passive resistance to oppression describes my own response to Glass’s early, hardline-minimalist operas (this one had its premiere in 1980).

Yet I was mesmerised, and not in a zombie-like way. True, you have to adjust your musical metabolism to the fact that, for example, the opening scene will comprise the same…